Investing venture capital funds in Brazilian startups is a lot like match-making, which would make Monashee’s Capital partners Eric Acher and Guillerme Decourt  part investor and one part Yenta. Today we sat down at their office to talk about educating the market about the role of a venture firm, taking the long view of investments, how to spot a winner and the importance of saying “no.”

“We’re not techy guys, we’re strategy-oriented,” Acher told me. As such, marrying the right idea with the right team is a strategy that Monashees views as central to their long term success. “An idea is a commodity,” Acher said. “The name of the game is compatibility.” And, just a like a  couple who saying their vows, Monashees is committed to the long-haul.

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It looks like the word is getting out. On Sunday TechtTrotter was mentioned in an article published by one of India’s largest daily newspapers, the Deccan Chronicle. According to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, the Chronicle has a circulation of over 1.3 million copies of their english-language.

In a story about changing job options for graduates of journalism programs, I was named along with Ankita Rao, a graduate of the University of Florida who will be taking a volunteer post in Northern India. We are both eschewing the traditional  post-graduation career path. You can read the story called “Catch A Falling Star This Year” here.

I was pleased to receive the free publicity, but the story itself was riddled with factual inaccuracies. Because a journalist lives and dies by his credibility, it’s worth taking a second to highlight some of the many mistakes that were injected into the story.

• The story misquotes me in direct citation. The author made a up a quote that sounded good. Here’s what author Asha Sachdev published:

“I created a journalistic project called TechTrotter (techtrotter. org) and it will take me travelling for two months to Brazil, Ukraine, Nigeria, South Africa, India and to the Philippines!” Chima writes to Rao.

Here’s what I wrote:

“Great post. You and I are embarking on similar journeys after the completion of the journalism degree. I will be traveling for two months to Brazil, Ukraine, Nigeria, South Africa and the Philippines as part of a journalistic project I created called TechTrotter. Check it out; www.techtrotter.org.”

You can see the original article and my comments here.

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[Image Via: Andre Deak]

The largest problem facing mainstream media outlets today is audience fragmentation. Major publishers once had a monopoly on their audience, but long gone are the days when a single local newspaper, or a triumvirate of national broadcasters could be confident  that everyone was tuning in to their message. The reality today is that competition for eyeballs takes the form of 24-hour news networks, niche cable channels, such as the Food Network, or ESPN, as well as Internet-only newspapers, blogs and video games. Competition today is also global.

Next week I head to Brazil to embark on the first leg of TechTrotter and today I’m starting to search the blogosphere for the best Brazilian technology writers. I was very intrigued when I found this post (translated from Portuguese) about a series of news-based video games that fuse fun with factfinding.  Andre Deak, whose article I found, mentions three different  types of video games a politician matching quiz, a Pacman-like game and a 1st person role player. By far the most interesting was the roleplaying game called “Global Conflicts: Latin America,” where the main character is a scrappy investigative reporter on the trail of corrupt officials and narco gangs in Mexico. I watched the trailer, but was unable to get the demo to load in my browser.

Based solely on what I saw in the trailer, however, it appears that the objective is to guide your character through a labyrinth of  conflicts of interests, violence and suffering in order to emerge with the story. Sounds a lot like the investigative work of my classmates at the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism. Alright, I may be kidding about that, but I find it fascinating that a video game publisher is paying tribute to the role of journalists in our society and the risks that can be involved in breaking a major story. According to The Committee to Protect Journalists, 15 journalists have been killed in Mexico in since they began keeping records in 1992. Since the start of 2009 two more Mexican reporters have been killed, according to CPJ.

At the graduation ceremony for the Columbia Journalism School, the keynote speaker was Alejandro Junco de la Vega, Mexico’s largest newspaper publisher, who was the first non-American to be honored with the Columbia Journalism Award. While in his speech he downplayed the risks he and his family face, de la Vega relocated his family to the U.S. out of safety concerns, according to the Knight Center for Journalism at his University of Texas, his alma mater.

De la Vegas fearless  pursuit of the truth in Mexico’s drug war is commendable and his efforts are crucial to a free and open society. Whether the act of journalism itself can generate  blockbuster video game sales is debatable, however, it’s certainly an interesting turn or events. In the future, I would be happy to see old media types investing into these sorts of innovations. We’ve come along way since newspapers simply duplicated their print version online, but there is a still a long way to go for mainstream outlets to go before they once again captivate a young, tech savvy audience. Perhaps they should use their resources to jump into video game production whole hog. Anyway, it’s just a thought.

If you believe everything you read on Twitter, the swine flu outbreak has already decimated the Mexican population and the U.S. is directly in the path of an angry, destructive wave of misery. A state of emergency has been declared for all 50 states and the National Guard is patrolling Times Square to prevent further spread of the infection. Fortunately, just because someone tweets a rumor doesn’t make it true.

“Any medium can be used to spread rumors, it’s not new to Twitter,” said Katrin Verclas, founder and director of MobileActive.org.  MobileActive, a global network of non-profits and practicioners that use mobile phones for social impact.

Verclas was in Mexico City meeting with the country’s health ministry when the swine flu outbreak became an international health emergency. We met in Union Square in New York on Sunday and Verclas told me a lot of the hype is overblown even though more than 100 people have already died in Mexico. “People still have to weed out good information from false information,” said Verclas.

In Mexico, Verclas monitored people’s reactions to the flu outbreak on Twitter. She said in the beginning, people were using the site to circulate links to reliable news sources such as the Associated Press and articles that had appeared in the mainstream press. People were also using the site to make the best of a bad situation, suggesting that before the Mexican parliament got itself vaccinated on Monday (though no proven vaccine exists), citizens had the weekend to cough germs onto their elected officials.

In the U.S. is likely to be much worse, largely due to Twitter, Verclas said. On his net.effect blog, Evgeny Mozorov wrote about Twitter’s remarkable power to misinform. According to Mozorov,

In the context of a global pandemic – where media networks are doing their best to spice up an already serious threat – having millions of people wrap up all their fears into 140 characters and blurt them out in the public might have some dangerous consequences, networked panic being one of them.

Verclas said that Americans are used to stability and anything that upsets the status quo is bound to cause a stir, especially when misinformation spreads at the speed of Twitter. Verclas pointed out that Twitter users in Mexico represent a very elite contingent of total Internet users, however, she argued that social media should still has in important role to play in public health notification and disaster response.

While the mainstream media is the best method for conveying detailed information, such as tsunami evacuation routes, SMS, and peer-to-peer digital communication is a vital component of a robust public response system.  Verclas said, people may not read the newspaper or watch television on a daily basis, but they almost always check text messages and keep their phone in their pocket, or nearby at the very least.

Our first multimedia feature on TechTrotter is an unexpected interview with columnist, author and tastemaker Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times.  Late last week Friedman was spotted hanging around the Columbia Journalism School building and when I saw him Friday, I sprang into action. Although he was loath to discuss why he was on campus, speculation is rampant that is has something to do with the announcement of Pulitzer Prize awards.

Friedman is someone I admire for his prescience and depth of knowledge. The premise of Friedman’s book, ‘The World is Flat,‘ singlehandedly inspired the TechTrotter excursion, because as he told me in our interview, when someone in Philadelphia has a good idea, someone in the Philippines has that idea one second later. I would even venture to say that someone in Philly might have that idea a second after someone in Manila, though I’ve got nothin’ but love for Philly. In sum, competition in a flattened world means that innovation can and will come from unlikely quarters.

While I have been challenged by Friedman’s ideas, since I started reading his column over a decade ago, his image has been tarnished in no small part by his ardent support for the Iraq War, his denunciations of the Obama bailout strategy and his calls for the Federal Government to bailout venture capitalists, his influence will live on in the strength of his ideas, whether or not people are willing to swallow all of what he has to say.

As far as global entrepreneurship and competition from the developing world are concerned, his writing was sage, and I invite you to disagree as politely or forcefully as you wish.